I am a person who 1) thinks Zach Evans is good at running the football, 2) isn’t confident that he’ll get the bulk of the touches in the Rams’ backfield this week, and 3) gets triggered by bad arguments from other people online, so even though nobody asked, I wanted to quickly outline my thoughts on this situation and address some of the bad logic I’ve seen employed in discussions about it on Twitter.

Let’s examine the common refrain of “Evans is bad, otherwise he would’ve beaten out Ronnie Rivers.” While it is true that Evans and Rivers are both running backs, they do not serve the same purpose on this roster and therefore the fact that Rivers has been active on game-days while Evans has been inactive is not necessarily a reflection of the former’s greater running back abilities than the latter’s. To illustrate this point, an examination of the team’s weekly usage of their running backs so far this season will be helpful (offensive participation data courtesy of fantasylife.com, special teams data from Pro Football Focus):

The Rams have deployed Kyren Williams as a bellcow in every game this season except week one (and even then he played a large majority of the snaps despite not starting), and other than the week six game in which both Williams and Rivers got hurt, they have otherwise given only one non-Williams running back offensive snaps in any particular game. They have one of the most workload-consolidated backfields in the league in addition to one of the most snap-consolidated backfields in the league. The guy who operates as their RB2 each week has also been asked to play a relatively substantial role on special teams, with none of those guys playing fewer than eight special teams snaps or with fewer than two special teams units in any game this season. Despite not playing more than two running backs on offense, the Rams have dressed a third running back for each game, whom they’ve used every week as another key contributor on their special teams units.

Rivers entered the NFL last offseason after having played 239 special teams snaps over his five-year career at Fresno State, including 192 snaps on which he didn’t return either a kickoff or a punt. As a rookie with the Rams last season, he played another 36 special teams snaps across three different special teams units (kickoff return, kickoff coverage, and punt return). By contrast, Evans declared for the draft after having played only 20 special teams snaps in three years combined at TCU and Ole Miss, none of which involved him returning a kick or punt. Unlike Rivers, who was a 168-pound two-star recruit back in 2017 who had to fight for playing time at a Mountain West school, Evans was a five-star guy who turned down offers at blue-blood programs like Georgia, Alabama, and Ohio State to sign with TCU, and was pretty immediately the most talented player on the team (if you’re under the illusion that Evans was not a good player in college, I’ll direct you here, here, here, here, here, or here rather than rehashing his resume and the context surrounding it in this article). He simply never had to learn how to play special teams, a reality that has slowed his integration into the game-day plans of his NFL squad (and perhaps helped to subdue the draft capital he received in the spring).

Positive signs of Evans’ development in that area have come in the form of his being active in both week five and week six, as he seemingly supplanted Royce Freeman as the Rams’ third running back and also earned the trust of the coaching staff enough to play one and then eight special teams snaps in those games.

Another likely barrier to Evans’ playing time that doesn’t necessarily reflect poorly upon his ability to contribute with the ball in his hands is the pass-happy approach that Los Angeles has taken on offense this season. Despite ranking tenth in the NFL in point differential (they’re at +21 through six games), the Rams are sixth in the league in pass-to-run ratio. They are the only team in the top-nine of that metric with a positive point differential, indicating a philosophical commitment to the pass that is not dependent on the game scripts they have found themselves in. Indeed, rbsdm.com indicates both that the team ranks sixth in the NFL in pass rate on early downs in neutral game-script situations (when the playbook is wide open), and that they have passed the ball 2% more often than expected given the down-and-distance situations they’ve encountered this season (including far more often than expected on second-and-long, second-and-short, and first down in general, the latter two of which are often seen by coaches as “running downs”). Further evidence of the team’s low-priority treatment of the running game is the fact that Williams has seen such high snap and opportunity shares (he ranks first and eighth, respectively, in those categories so far this year according to playerprofiler.com) despite running the ball poorly. Prior to his objectively great performance in week six, Williams was contributing nearly an entire yard fewer than expected on a per-carry basis despite rushing in relatively advantageous situations, and even following the 158-yard game he posted against the Cardinals, he ranks 26th out of 41 qualifying runners with -0.12 Rushing Yards over Expected per attempt, and 22nd among the same group in rate of runs gaining positive RYOE. Among the 15 running backs with at least 80 carries this season, Williams ranks 12th in RYOE per attempt and 10th in positive RYOE rate.

Williams has been a net negative on the ground this season, but the Rams continue to trot him out there as their do-it-all bellcow because (I contend) they care far more about his abilities as a pass-blocker and pass-receiver than they do about his abilities as a ball-carrier (though with three drops on 24 targets contributing to a 76.5% True Catch Rate and a 6.2 yards-per-catchable-target average that rank 45th and 25th, respectively, out of 49 running backs with 10+ targets on the season, it’s not as if he’s been good as a receiver so far). Rivers’ low volume indicates that he also is not active and on the field due to his skills as a rusher. He didn’t receive a single carry until week four -- when he turned nine attempts into a solid 47 yards -- and has run the ball just four times since then, attempts he’s converted into ten yards. He’s active first because he contributes on special teams, second because he’s a capable receiver who caught 150 passes in college, and third because whatever he does on his 2.2 carries per game isn’t going to move the needle much either way.

We’ve established that Evans does not have much special teams experience, but he also isn’t nearly as accomplished a pass-game contributor as Rivers (or Williams) is. While I think his efficiency and usage hint at more ability than the volume numbers show, Evans caught just 30 passes and notched just 40 pass-protection reps in three seasons of college ball, compared to 231 and 213 in the latter category for Rivers and Williams, respectively. At TCU and Ole Miss, he was a pure runner in the most literal sense of the term, and while the other guys in this Rams backfield can’t touch his ability in that area (for reference and to this point, here are my pre-draft evaluations of Rivers and Williams), they are simply more well-rounded players who fit what Sean McVay wants to do with this offense more cleanly. Cam Akers was also a better runner than both Rivers and Williams, but McVay shipped him out to Minnesota because he simply doesn’t care to put his best runners on the field when they don’t offer value in the passing game (or when they rub him the wrong way for whatever reason, as seems to have often been the case given the wishy-washy approach with which McVay has handed out playing time to running backs in the post-Todd Gurley era).

Ultimately, none of this means that Evans will operate as the team’s lead back against the Steelers (maybe they’ll give Darrell Henderson the work, maybe they’ll sign a Williams-type non-value-adding rusher with pass-blocking chops like Leonard Fournette, who knows), none of it means he’ll run well on whatever opportunities he does receive, and none of it means he’s destined to supplant Rivers as RB2 or Williams as RB1, though I think all of those outcomes would be undeniably more fun than the alternatives. It does mean, however, that you should stop parroting bad arguments about how Evans must suck because he’s been a game-day inactive behind JAG-level talents like Rivers and Freeman (and Williams, shoot me), and it does mean that you can simultaneously believe that a player is good in a particular and typically-important aspect of playing his position and acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons why his teammates might be preferred by the coaching staff given their ability to contribute in other areas that happen to take higher priority in the context of the team’s unique philosophical bent. We don’t have to analyze football players with our brains in the microwave.